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1. Introduction
The world of work is undergoing dramatic change due to factors such as globalization, technological innovation, and increasing demographic and cultural diversity in the workplace ([12] Cascio, 2003). As a result, there are greater demands on the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other personal attributes that organizations require of current and future employees. These changes also underscore the importance of an organization's ability to attract and retain the most qualified applicants in order to remain viable in the current business environment. Given the competitive nature of this environment, organizations would undoubtedly benefit from a greater understanding of how applicants react to the use and administration of their recruitment activities.
Over the last two decades, theorists have commented on the hierarchical, multi-level nature of organizational activities ([35] Kozlowski and Klein, 2000), with an increase in the application of multi-level theory to recruitment and selection phenomena (e.g. [41] Ployhart, 2004; [43] Ployhart and Schneider, 2002, [44] 2005). While progress has been made toward understanding multi-level issues in recruitment and selection research, many unanswered questions remain. Signaling theory offers considerable promise in this regard.
Signaling theory ([48] Rynes, 1991; [53] Spence, 1973) is commonly used to explain how applicant attraction to a recruiting organization may, in part, can be influenced by information, or signals, about an organization's characteristics revealed during recruitment activities. It is recognized that applicants construe many recruitment-related activities and information as signals of unknown organizational characteristics ([18] Collins and Stevens, 2002; [58] Turban and Cable, 2003), and recruiter characteristics and/or behavior ([48] Rynes, 1991; [59] Turban et al. , 1998). In this paper, we suggest that signals from recruiting organizations may be conceptualized from individual-level and organizational-level perspectives.
While signaling theory demonstrates the potential to explain the influence of many predictors on applicant attraction outcomes ([22] Ehrhart and Ziegert, 2005), social identity theory ([56] Tajfel and Turner, 1979) and self-categorization theory ([62] Turner et al. , 1987) have the potential to help researchers understand the conditions under which applicants look upon certain signals more favorably than others.
The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we discuss the application of a multi-level perspective to signaling theory in a recruitment context. Second, we discuss how the integration of signaling theory and the social identity approach...